Government Spying on Americans … and then Giving Info to Giant Corporations

Big Banks and Other Corporate Bigwigs Benefit from Illegal Spying

But you might not know that the government shares some of that information with big corporations.

Reuters reported in 2011 that the NSA shares intelligence with Wall Street banks in the name of “battling hackers.”

The National Security Agency, a secretive arm of the U.S. military, has begun providing Wall Street banks with intelligence on foreign hackers, a sign of growing U.S. fears of financial sabotage.The assistance from the agency that conducts electronic spying overseas is part of an effort by American banks and other financial firms to get help from the U.S. military and private defense contractors to fend off cyber attacks, according to interviews with U.S. officials, security experts and defense industry executives.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also warned banks of particular threats amid concerns that hackers could potentially exploit security vulnerabilities to wreak havoc across global markets and cause economic mayhem.

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NSA Director Keith Alexander, who runs the U.S. military’s cyber operations, told Reuters the agency is currently talking to financial firms about sharing electronic information on malicious software, possibly by expanding a pilot program through which it offers similar data to the defense industry.

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NSA, which has long been charged with protecting classified government networks from attack, is already working with Nasdaq to beef up its defenses after hackers infiltrated its computer systems last year and installed malicious software that allowed them to spy on the directors of publicly held companies.

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The NSA’s work with Wall Street marks a milestone in the agency’s efforts to make its cyber intelligence available more broadly to the private sector.

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Greater cooperation with industry became possible after a deal reached a year ago between the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, allowing NSA to provide cyber expertise to other government agencies and certain private companies.

“Right now, the ability to share real-time information is complicated and there are legal barriers. We have to overcome that,” Gen Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said during a Thursday appearance at Georgia Tech’s Cyber Security Symposium.

[Alexander has been pushing for the anti-privacy Internet bill known as “CISPA” to be passed.] “It allows the government to start working with industry and … discuss with each of these sector about the best approach,” he said.

CISPA would allow the NSA to more openly share data with corporations in the name of protecting against “cyber threats.” But that phrase is too squisy. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:

A “cybersecurity purpose” only means that a company has to think that a user is trying to harm its network. What does that mean, exactly? The definition is broad and vague. The definition allows purposes such as guarding against “improper” information modification, ensuring “timely” access to information or “preserving authorized restrictions on access…protecting…proprietary information” (i.e. DRM).

More importantly, as the ACLU notes, “Fusion Centers” – a hybrid of military, intelligence agency, police and private corporations set up in centers throughout the country, and run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security – allow big businesses like Boeing to get access to classified information which gives them an unfair advantage over smaller competitors:

Participation in fusion centers might give Boeing access to the trade secrets or security vulnerabilities of competing companies, or might give it an advantage in competing for government contracts. Expecting a Boeing analyst to distinguish between information that represents a security risk to Boeing and information that represents a business risk may be too much to ask.

A 2008 Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office review of fusion centers concluded that they presented risks to privacy because of ambiguous lines of authority, rules and oversight, the participation of the military and private sector, data mining, excessive secrecy, inaccurate or incomplete information and the dangers of mission creep.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found in 2012 that fusion centers spy on citizens, produce ‘shoddy’ work unrelated to terrorism or real threats:

“The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

Ironically, records indicate that corporate entities engaged in such public-private intelligence sharing partnerships were often the very same corporate entities criticized, and protested against, by the Occupy Wall Street movement as having undue influence in the functions of public government.

The $103,000 no-bid contract awarded by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR) in 2009 is a drop in the bucket. ITRR, a private security firm headed by a former PA chief of police, was given the task of providing the department with thrice-weekly intelligence bulletins that identified threats to the state’s critical infrastructure. Instead of focusing on real threats, however, ITRR turned its attention to law-abiding activist groups including Tea Party protesters, pro-life activists, and anti-fracking environmental organizations. The bulletins included information about when and where local environmental groups would be meeting, upcoming protests, and anti-fracking activists’ internal strategy. As I recently wrote in my Investigative Fund/Earth Island Journal story, the bulletins were then distributed to local police chiefs, state, federal, and private intelligence agencies, and the security directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms. The state’s Department of Homeland Security was essentially providing intelligence to the natural gas industry about their detractors. And Pennsylvania taxpayers were footing the bill.

Perhaps because it was a relatively small contract the Pennsylvania spy scandal was brushed aside as an unfortunate mistake. Then-Governor Ed Rendell, whose own ties to the natural gas industry have recently been exposed, called the episode “deeply embarrassing.” The state terminated its contract with ITRR, a one-day Senate hearing was held, and the matter largely forgotten. But the Pennsylvania story is not an isolated case. In fact, it represents a larger pattern of corporate and police spying on activists and everyday citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

A report published by the Center for Media and Democracy last month detailed how Homeland Security fusion centers, corporations, and local law enforcement agencies have teamed up to spy on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Fusion centers, created between 2003 and 2007 by the Department of Homeland Security, are centers for the sharing of federal-level information between the CIA, FBI, US military, local governments, and more. The more than 70 fusion centers, whose primary task is to analyze and share information with public and private actors, are part of Homeland Security’s growing “Information Sharing Environment” (ISE). According to their website, ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with integrated and synthesized terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security information needed to enhance national security and help keep our people safe.” The other big domestic public-private intelligence sharing ventures are Infragard, managed by the FBI’s Cyber Division Public/Private Alliance Unit, and the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), which openly states that its mission includes “advancing the ability of the U.S. private sector to protect its employees, assets and proprietary information.”

The little known DSAC brings together representatives from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and some of the nation’s most powerful corporations. Twenty-nine corporations and banks are on the DSAC Leadership Board, including Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, and Wal-Mart. The Department of Homeland Security also has a Private Sector Information-Sharing Working Group, which includes representatives from more than 50 Fortune 500 companies. They have pushed for increased funding of public-private intelligence sharing partnerships, largely through the expansion of fusion centers. According to the Department of Homeland Security website, “Our nation faces an evolving threat environment, in which threats not only emanate from outside our borders, but also from within our communities. This new environment demonstrates the increasingly critical role fusion centers play to support the sharing of threat related information between the federal government and federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial partners.”

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As Mike German, an FBI special agent for 16 years who now works for the ACLU told me, “These systems and this type of collection is so rife with inappropriate speculation and error — both intentional and unintentional — that your good behavior doesn’t protect you.”

[T]he fossil fuel industry is seeking to protect itself from an increasingly restless environmental movement. One way of doing so is to paint the opposition as extremists or potential terrorists. “It’s the new politics of the petro-state,” Jeff Monaghan, a researcher with the Surveillance Studies Center at Queen’s University in Ontario, said. “It’s like this is not only environmental activism it’s activism against our way of life. It’s activism against the economy and the system. Because the system is now a petro system.”

Indeed, because of its enormous shale gas reserves, the United States is already being talked of as a future petro-state, and shale gas development a matter of national security. In his keynote address at the 2011 Shale Gas Insight Conference sponsored by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, Tom Ridge, former head of the Department of Homeland Security, described shale gas as vital to US national security. Everything that goes along with it — the rigs, pipelines, and compressor stations (not to mention air and water pollution) — will be viewed as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. According to the Center for Media and Democracy report, “The stated purpose of protecting ‘critical infrastructure/key resources’ has come to serve as the single largest avenue for corporate involvement in the ‘homeland security’ apparatus.”

And given that some 70% of the national intelligence budget is spent on private sector contractors. that millions of private contractors have clearance to view information gathered by spy agencies – including kids like 29 year old spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, who explained that he had the power to spy on anyone in the country – and that information gained by the NSA by spying on Americans is being shared with agencies in other countries, at least some of the confidential information is undoubtedly leaking into private hands for profit, without the government’s knowledge or consent.

There is a long and unfortunate history of cooperation between government security agencies and powerful corporations to deprive individuals of their privacy and other civil liberties, and any program that institutionalizes close, secretive ties between such organizations raises serious questions about the scope of its activities, now and in the future.

Indeed, the government has been affirmatively helping the big banks, giant oil companies and other large corporations cover up fraud and to go after critics. For example, Business Week reported on May 23, 2006:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.

U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve’s bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

The DHS issued a directive to employees in July 2009 requiring a wide range of public records requests to pass through political appointees for vetting. These included any requests dealing with a “controversial or sensitive subject” or pertaining to meetings involving prominent business leaders and elected officials. Requests from lawmakers, journalists, and activist and watchdog groups were also placed under this scrutiny.

The government is also using anti-terrorism laws to keep people from learning what pollutants are in their own community, in order to protect the fracking, coal and other polluting industries. See this, this, this, this and this.

Infringing the copyright of a big corporation may also get labeled as a terrorist … and a swat team may be deployed to your house. See this, this, this and this. As the executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School notes:

This administration … publishes a newsletter about its efforts with language that compares copyright infringement to terrorism.

That statement expounds a wonderfully scientific argument. Logically, it’s very easy to understand. And, sociologically, it’s a compelling statement about your proper conduct in society. Essentially, now, you can only be free, if you are on the run.

It’s the root of a -one strike, you’re out- campaign.

Now the government has all the means to spy on you, to gather evidence about you, and typically to add fake evidence about who you are and what you are doing, and then have you executed wherever you may be, and whenever you may be there, on the spot where you are going to die. Death is a very final solution. Assassination and murder have always been part of the political landscape. And now, being political has become such a common attribute of existence, we’re all at risk.

The long arm of the law is all so neat and tidy. We’re right, because we’re the law. And we’re going to have a problem, if you don’t trust us to do this.

gozounlimited

And the long arm of our corrupted law is flying over YOUR head…… The Purpose of Geoengineering and Chemtrails is Death (Activist Post)

In earlier times it was easier to control a million people than physically to kill a million people. Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people then to control a million people. – Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group)…… read more: http://www.activistpost.com/2013/06/the-purpose-of-geoengineering-and.html

Your defaming this site and everyone on it, by portraying everyone as a bunch of dope-smoking would-be rastafarians is probably spot-on.

Thanks for your comment.

BT

I would say the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist without 15 brothers, if looking for the best. While it has been shown indiscriminate bombings of a people that have caused no, or intended to cause any harm can radicalize. I think the term is blow back that the CIA uses, like the Iranian hostage crisis, which was a direct response of our CIA removing a democratically elected sitting president to install an American dictator in the name of Freedom, errrr I mean British Petroleum either in 1953 or 1954, cant recall.

There in lies the problem. If they did not collect the phone records, and only numbers there would be no issue at all, no scandal. The problem is that they are collecting this data as confirmed by the whistle blower, and the reach of the illegal activity will be felt far outside the borders of the U.S. with allies questioning whether their private information has been compromised as well as corporations. The only defense that can be used is the same as always, and that is standing. Unless these records are used in an attempt to prosecute, and attempted to be used in a trial, they will be inadmissible in court, so the theory that they are using this to keep America safe is a ruse, and not believable.

More than likely all of this is for one of two things, and the first being the worst case, that the government was spying on everyone looking for political decent, as well as using this data for demographic studies for election victories, both of which are immoral and illegal. Second, they are data mining this information to sell to corporations for marketing purposes, which again is immoral and illegal. This issue if allowed to go forward by the American people will end Democracy in our Republic, and hence end the project of freedom and a free society under military rule, and the ruler will be whom ever is in power at the time.

They tell you that they were just getting “metadata” from Verizon. Well yea, no shit…NSA is already recording everyone’s calls, so what they need is the metadata to add to their database to tie a name and address to all those recordings.

the NSA is a terrorist organization. Out there in the open. For all to see.

… soooo .. what is being done to kill this terrorist organization? .. well. I guess this particular terrorist organization operates to secure the power of the Mafia behind the western governments. So nothing will be done.

You are ALL missing the point… First, this is being done for information derivatives. That is part of the new currency. Second, it is not ‘illegal’ if they are spying on citizens, persons, individuals as they are ALL government property, if you knew the law, this would make sense. Is it morally and ethically corrupt, yes. But you are witnessing the worlds largest algorithm being made before your eyes.

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